1. Technical Field
This disclosure concerns a collaboration tool that is accessible simultaneously by multiple users through multiple sources. In particular, this disclosure concerns a system, product and method for sharing a user interface surface and corresponding shared surface object that coordinates local manipulations of respective local representations of the user interface surface and corresponding shared surface object, and updates the respective local representations with a group representation.
2. Related Art
Organizations are continually challenged to identify efficient and cost effective collaboration tools. Today, members of globally distributed organizations increasingly collaborate with other members from different regions of the world. Unfortunately, rising fuel costs and the time required to travel in order to collocate individuals create barriers to improving the economic positions of many organizations. Unfortunately, organizations without collaboration tools that are simple, lightweight and provide a high performance way to share a user interface surface among multiple users may, as a result, also fail to realize the productivity gains necessary to be competitive.
The fast pace of many industries require organizations to rapidly assemble teams from various areas of expertise that can quickly identify problems and develop solutions. Organizations with globally distributed workforces who work under compressed development schedules in highly specialized and complex knowledge areas need a tool that reduces barriers to collaboration. Regardless of the geographical distribution of an organization, members of organizations may have diverse collaboration requirements (e.g., varying languages, physical disabilities and computing resources) that many collaboration tools may not even accommodate.
Currently available collaboration tools are generally restricted in one of three ways: 1) a physical location defines where a collaboration may take place (e.g., Thunder® and TeamSpot®); 2) a session defines the availability and existence of shared content so that once the session ends the shared content becomes unavailable (e.g., WebEx and Adobe Connect®); and 3) a user owns a document, the user grants and revokes rights to the document, and the document is stored on the owner's resources where documents are shared over a network (e.g., Microsoft OneNote®).
Collaboration tools that are highly customized and expensive to implement may impose user-side computing requirements (e.g., resource intensive client-side systems) and require significant user training. For example, Sharepoint® documents are serially checked-out and edited from a common repository. Some group-collaboration tools adhere to strictly linear text formats (e.g., SubEthaEdit® and Google Docs®). Collaborative tools such as skrbl.com®, thinkature.com®, conceptShare® and Adobe JamJar® are based on small text snippets, but limit the type of content available for sharing. Collaboration tools often may use elaborate schemes in order to maintain versioning information for each collaborator and require significant system administration support in order to properly maintain. Such collaboration tools may also limit the type of information and data with which users can collaborate.